Long COVID in the C-Suite: How Childhood Crises Shape CEO Decisions

By Professor Kunru ZOU

Ah, the COVID-19 pandemic. Who doesn’t remember the masks, the confinement, the vaccine debates, the social distancing and, more seriously, the tragic loss of life and the financial toll on so many businesses? For those who lived through it as children or teenagers, those years were formative ones, marked by disruption, uncertainty, and resilience. While memories fade, it’s worth asking: what happens when that generation grows up to run companies of their own? According to new research[1], their early-life experience of the pandemic could determine how they respond to crises for years to come.

As the CEO role shifts from operations to identity, who these leaders are—and what shaped them—matters more than ever. The researchers look at how early-life exposure to crisis, particularly past epidemics, influenced how today’s executives navigated COVID-19. Their focus: whether those formative shocks left a mark on investment decisions and corporate transparency when the world shut down.

The study tracks the CEOs of U.S. public firms from 2010 to 2021, using data from S&P’s ExecuComp to link their birthplaces with historical records of major disasters and disease outbreaks during their formative years, roughly ages 5 to 15. Within this framework, the authors identify which executives experienced early-life adversity (“imprinted CEOs”) and examine how those experiences influenced their decisions during COVID-19. The results are striking. Following the initial lockdowns, firms led by imprinted CEOs cut capital expenditure growth by 18 percentage points more than their peers on average. Since pre-pandemic spending patterns were similar across both groups, this reinforces the idea that the difference reflects how these leaders reacted under stress, rather than any preexisting strategic approach. The effect is especially strong in industries hardest hit by the pandemic, where imprinted CEOs appeared even more cautious in their investment and communication choices.

To ensure the effect wasn’t simply about resilience to generic or natural disasters—especially since such resilience might itself have influenced their selection as CEO—the authors focused on childhood exposure to infectious diseases such as measles, tuberculosis, polio, and scarlet fever. These CEOs proved even more conservative, as their firms used 6.8% fewer positive words in financial reports and were nearly 30 percentage points less likely to issue upbeat earnings guidance during lockdowns.

The findings point to a lasting psychological imprint: leaders who faced deadly epidemics early in life carried that sense of risk into boardroom decisions decades later. In short, the pandemic revealed how childhood shocks can shape corporate strategy long after the masks come off. Or, as the poet William Wordsworth wrote two centuries ago, “The child is father of the man.” Hardly management theory, but it certainly seems to fit the data!

Reference:

[1]  Ru, H., Yang, E., & Zou, K. (2022). Early-life experience and CEOs’ reactions to COVID-19. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4199775